Since I was a child, I have always been enchanted by the sunlight filtering through the leaves. I recently learned, in one of those viral “repost” things–this one being about non-English words that encapsulate an experience that we don’t have a single word for in English–that there is a Japanese word for this. Komorebi. It seems appropriate that the language, culture and aesthetic that has a word like “hanami” (the act of viewing cherry blossoms in the spring, as well as a festival associated with the occasion) and another traditional festival associated with the act of viewing autumn colours, would also have a word that describes this phenomenon.

But, much as I love the sight of sunlight filtering through leaves–and I do love that interplay of light, colour, shadow and movement–the thing that I might love even more is the dance of the shadows of leaves, branches, blossoms or buds. I’m not sure why, particularly given that komorebi itself is so bright, and I so love the way that sunlight and shadows interact with colours, transforming them from one moment to the next. I feel a deep, welling joy when I see that interplay. Continue reading →

We recently (finally) got around to watching Breaking Bad, a program that features one of the most fully-developed, envisioned and enacted tragic falls that we have yet to see in popular culture, as discussed in a previous post.

We are now in the process of watching the American edition of House of Cards, Season 2–no doubt along with a significant proportion of the rest of the netflix-subscribing population.

The two characters–and series–present a fascinating set of contrasts. Both works feature frequent nods to Macbeth.House of Cards even goes so far as to have these wonderful soliloquies and asides that at least for my part, I find as effective as Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences must have found the asides and soliloquies of Shakespeare and other contemporary works. There is something chilling, thrilling, disturbing and peculiarly disarming about being the confidant of the villain, party to those inner thoughts and observations to which no-one else has access. It draws us in, as we watch his intricate machinations with bated horror. There are other wonderful, resonant references as well, which I touched on in the post I wrote last year–the extinguishing of the candle, for instance, and Frank’s relationship with his wife.

Breaking Bad‘s allusions are more muted, but nonetheless detectable. One of the more elegant ones comes when Walter is holed up in his cabin and walks to the gate, then says “Tomorrow…”. All is lost at that stage, and Walter is weary. It is a powerful moment of temporary capitulation.

Macbeth is itself a play that has always fascinated me. For me, the crux of the work, and the crux of how an actor will play the Scottish anti-hero, derives from the question of whether the witches’ prophecy that he will be king, transforms him from being a genuinely honourable man and war hero into an amoral killer who is slowly eaten from the inside out by his ambition, or whether it simply gives him permission to do what he wanted to do all along, but which the bounds of propriety did not allow. As a student, reading the play in English class, I had believed the former–that Macbeth was once good, and turned bad. Now, as an adult, I’m leaning towards the other reading. He was that way all along, and just needed permission to cast aside his morality. Continue reading →

There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don't make sense.
...
You will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!
-Excerpts from “On the fly-leaf of Pound’s Cantos”
By Basil Bunting

I grew up on the West Coast of Canada, in a land of mountains and ocean.

At a seminar I attended years ago, the professor spoke of the idea of an “internal landscape”. He spoke of how, having grown up in the prairies, his internal landscape was characterized by endless horizons and vast stretches of sky.

For me, it was mountains and ocean that shaped my consciousness.

Growing up out west, the moods of the landscape held me fascinated. Sunny days were dazzling, the mountains and the ocean sharp-edged, as if formed from cut crystal, the vegetation seething with the dark green of ancient knowing. Equally fascinating were the days when clouds streaked across the folds and crags of the mountains and blurred the line between ocean and sky.

This marked my early, visceral connection with the spiritual. It has stayed with me since.

But there was another side to my spirituality as well. My Anglo-Indian ancestors had lived in India for generations, and I grew up with colourful family lore. One of my favourites tells of how my great grandmother encountered Death at the bedside of her ailing daughter, my great aunt. Nor do I mean the abstracted idea of death, but rather Death, personified as a wizened, brown-skinned woman in a white sari. Continue reading →

There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.
And moving thro' a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
There she sees the highway near
Winding down to Camelot:
There the river eddy whirls,
And there the surly village-churls,
And the red cloaks of market girls,
Pass onward from Shalott.

I’ve been thinking about Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott often of late. It’s a poem that I’ve always liked (not the least because of all the gorgeous associated illustrations, and Loreena McKennitt’s lovely musical setting), because of where it would take me during those dreamy, fanciful years of my youth.

Despite this, I’ve always found the story frustrating. We are told the Lady is under a curse that forbids her from looking at the world directly. Instead, she looks through a mirror that is angled so that it reflects the landscape outside the window. The mirror mediates her reality, and she takes the images she sees in the mirror and weaves them into a tapestry of her own.

And yet, the poem also acknowledges that she doesn’t even know the nature of the curse, nor its consequences. I was discussing it with my brother recently, and we agreed that Tennyson leaves it ambiguous as to whether there actually is a curse that is ultimately triggered when she looks directly upon Lancelot and the world outside, or whether the consequences that flow from her act are simply self-fulfilling. In other words, because she believes there is a curse and that she triggered it, she behaves accordingly, and ends up succumbing to a dire fate that is ultimately the result of her own assumptions, paradigms and ways of parsing reality. Continue reading →

I’ve continued watching Downton, as time permits. It has moved a little out of the rut that it had fallen into when I did my last post. But I have to admit, the main frustrations I have with it (and with the villains in particular) remain.

Still, it’s set in a period and against a backdrop I particularly enjoy. If you’re a fan, something like Upstairs Downstairs is one of the more obvious comparators. I remember watching some of that, and being initially engaged, before losing interest for some reason, many years ago. Here are some other films and shows that evoke elements of Downton–and which sustained my interest throughout.Continue reading →

I know. This isn’t Downton. It’s Brideshead, 1981 edition. More on that below.

My husband and I have been watching Downton Abbey these past weeks and we’re now partway through the second season (so, you know, here there be spoilers, at least up to part way through the second season–be ye duly warned). We both really liked the first season, and I found the first few episodes of the second season engaging.

There’s a lot to love–the beautiful setting, the beautiful characters; the fact that the good characters, aside from minor flaws (a temper, an impulsiveness, a peculiar blindness in the context of one’s lady’s maid), are very good; and the bad characters, aside from occasionally redemptive acts, are reliably awful. This means that as viewers, we can feel a kind of safety in watching. Bates will always be quiet, courtly and honourable, even to his own detriment; Lady Sybil will be reliably activist and progressive; and so on.

This reliability is something appealing about the show. Except when it stops being appealing, and starts to feel static. Continue reading →

A number of years ago, my husband brought this website to my attention. These are the photographs of a man named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, a photographer who lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and whose photographic method allowed him to win the funding of Tsar Nicholas II. He travelled the Russian Empire, documenting in full, vibrant and gorgeous colour, a sampling of the vast and diverse scope of the Russian Tsarist regime short years before war and revolution caused it to disappear forever.

I was absolutely fascinated. Here were villages that had, in many cases, been untouched by electricity and the modernity of industrialization, but were documented in photographs so vivid and intense that they might have been taken yesterday. I kept coming back to them again and again. I couldn’t get over the colours–I always assume that somehow life was duller and less colourful in those old black and white photos (I know otherwise intellectually, but with no information to interpolate colour, my mind tends to infer drab shades). Not so. Continue reading →

Anyone who has read my short stories “Persephone’s Library” and “What Rough Beast” knows how profoundly the idea of preserving books in a time of ignorance, violence, censorship and the destruction of knowledge resonates with me. The preservation of knowledge, which often comes at great personal risk, is to me an act of immense heroism.

In Mali, amid all the other horrors and tragedies being perpetrated, Islamist insurgents set fire to a library that is a World Heritage site, and the repository of ancient texts, some dating as far back as the 13th century. These texts represent the history of the people of Northern Africa, and their loss would have been devastating not just to the history and culture of the region, but also a deep blow to all of us in the world who value history, knowledge, learning. Continue reading →

Once a year, for the twelve hours between sunset and sunrise, key streets in downtown Toronto shut down, and a series of artistic visions transform the urban landscape into a dream- (or nightmare-) scape of sometimes banal, occasionally extraordinary and oft-haunting projections. This is Nuit Blanche, a street art festival.

Museum for the End of the World. Photo by Kathryn Anthony.

We look forward to it, but with each passing year, it has become more crowded, more chaotic and more clogged by lineups and the annoyances of having to navigate the thickly seething masses (which I generally find exhausting), many of whom are in various stages of intoxication. Continue reading →

Search The Blog

Publishers

I’ve tried a couple of different apps whose purpose of existence is to alert users to the existence of other apps that are temporarily discounted or free. So far, the standout for me is Apps Gone Free. I’m not a … Continue reading →

A while back, I did a side-by-side review of the in-app dictation software in the more recent iOS versions and the free Dragon dictation app. The in-app software won (sad though I am to admit it, as I do love … Continue reading →

Looking back through my old posts, I was simultaneously astonished and chagrined that I had not yet written anything about Goodreader. It was one of my early purchases on the iPad and has been one of my top, go-to apps … Continue reading →

I’m a productivity junkie. Modern life, with all its devices, information and demands means that if you’ve got your fingers in more than one pie (and most of us do) we can’t afford to waste a moment–and that if we’re … Continue reading →